by Lee Woodruff
For an instant, Margaret stiffened, and an ugly, knowing look jammed on her face, as if she had just tasted something bitter. Roger, still unaware of the gaffe, was momentarily confused, as his daughters briefly stopped their preparations, wearing puzzled expressions.
Their grandson Sam burst into the dining room, hitting the table and causing the ice to tinkle against the crystal water glasses. Margaret turned back to look at Sam with controlled fury and then cut her gaze to the floor, wiping her hands on her apron. “Bring the roast in here, Roger,” said Margaret curtly, after a strangled pause.
It took Roger one uncomfortable moment, as he backtracked along the guy wire of his utterance, to realize his mistake. Christ Almighty. Had he just called his wife Julia? Had he let that slip unconsciously? Roger set the roast platter on the sideboard and moved into the kitchen doorframe, lowering his eyes, grateful for Margaret’s practical, unflappable nature. He was hopeful she wouldn’t give it another thought. She had no idea of the significance of the name, couldn’t possibly know who Julia was. It was a simple mistake, an honest mistake; he shouldn’t place any more weight on it than the times he simply called up the wrong word. There was so much confusion in the house, so many boisterous people and kids colliding, it was disorienting. There was no reason for Margaret to suspect that there was any more to it than that. Reassured, Roger busied himself situating the silver platter on the trivet.
Minutes later Margaret was herding all of them into the dining room. The rolls were out of the oven, the mashed potatoes and the oysters and corn casserole steaming in sterling chafing dishes. In the center of the table, Margaret had artfully arranged little crèche figures interspersed with fir boughs and candles, giving off an evergreen scent. The long tapers in the candlesticks flickered, illuminating the room’s metallic striped wallpaper. The grandchildren stomped their feet eagerly like ponies, entering the line one by one from the kitchen with newly washed hands. The fluffy piles of mashed potatoes their mothers had heaped on their plates were in disproportionate amount to the rest of the food.
Once they were all seated, Margaret reminded her grandchildren to put their napkins on their laps and turned to ask Ryan to say grace. For a small moment, everyone hesitated. This had been James’s role for the past few years as the oldest grandchild, and he had relished it. There was a momentary awkwardness, largely unnoticed by the children, and a collective realization that it was not so much that they were recovering from the loss of James on this very first Christmas season without him, but that they were learning to live around the edges of his absence.
“Thank you, God, for our food and for family. Please take care of us and please tell James that I miss him.” Ryan lifted his head but squeezed his eyes shut self-consciously.
Roger studied Maura as she smiled tentatively; the beginnings of tears swam in her eyes. He was pleased to see Pete reach for her hand. Margaret was also observing Maura, her mouth pursed.
“And may God protect those we love most,” Roger added, his eyes darting back to Maura and then Pete, who looked stoic, glazed even, from multiple beers in the den.
“Amen,” the table muttered in a staggered unison, and then there was the sudden scuttling of silverware on fine china as everyone dug into their heaped plates.
Later that night, after Stu and Jen had gone upstairs to settle Alice, and Erin’s family had headed home to leave carrots for the reindeer, Ryan sidled up to Roger on the couch while Maura and Pete were gathering their things.
“Do you think Santa will find James in heaven?”
The simplicity of the question ambushed Roger, and he pulled his grandson in for a hug.
“I do,” said Roger. “I think James is going to have a very good Christmas with God and all the angels up there. And you know, when you’re in heaven, you get to watch down on everyone else. He’ll be watching down on us too.” Roger rubbed Ryan’s shoulder for a moment and was struck by his marked resemblance to James, the same spray of freckles on the bridge of his nose, the clear blue wide-set eyes, a legacy from his side of the family. Ryan had recently gotten a haircut, and Roger smoothed the bristles at the nape of his neck where the barber had shaved him. As he hugged Ryan, Roger was struck by the slimness of his frame, the insubstantiality of a seven-year-old boy.
“Good,” Ryan said simply, “because I miss him.”
“Me too,” choked Roger. “I miss him too.”
23
Back home from Christmas eve dinner, Pete read “’Twas the Night before Christmas,” and they’d put out cookies and a glass of milk for Santa. Maura and Pete took turns tucking in both kids, soothing their excitement and urging them to fall asleep soon. They wandered downstairs, settling on the couch, sipping glasses of wine until they were certain the kids were asleep before carrying the presents up from their hiding place in the basement. They tiptoed around, making noises and then shushing each other, and yet it had been hard not to focus on the fact that there was one less stocking, one less excited child. The previous year, James had figured out that there was no Santa, but he had sworn up and down to keep that secret from his siblings.
Maura hesitated when Pete opened another bottle of red wine, but she held her tongue. He was already partway in the bag, his eyes matte, head panning in that slow deliberate way of closed-circuit security cameras. He’d made a fire earlier in the night, scrounging old logs in the garage, as neither of them had thought to order wood this fall, one of the many details that had evaporated from their formerly ordered household.
After they’d organized the gifts under the boughs of the fir tree, they sat on the rug in silence, watching the blinking colored lights reflect on their faces. Pete put his arm around her first and then moved toward her with a look of naked hunger and need. Exhausted from the festivities and saturated with past family memories, this was not how she had imagined the night would end. Maura steeled herself as he lifted her sweater and fumbled with the button at her waistband. Struggling out of his pants with a sense of urgency, his hands grazed her stomach, moving up to her breast and finding the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Pete bent his head and she squirmed out of her jeans, acutely aware of how her spine was pressed uncomfortably into the space where the rug dropped off to hardwood floor.
“I love you,” he said, thick tongued, pressing his lips to the side of her cheek by her ear, making the little nibbling, blowing motion that had wooed her back in college when it had seemed sexy and not so canned.
“Love you too,” she murmured, but she turned her head aside and squeezed her eyes shut. She was concentrating mightily on trying to relax her body from its involuntary, rigid stance. This was exactly what she should be doing now, she told herself, exactly where she should be, but she felt almost nothing; no desire, just a kind of vaporous rising panic. The wine at dinner made her a little fuzzy and now Pete was pawing at her, and she needed to pee. She shoved that thought aside.
“I’ve missed you,” he moaned, and she wrapped her legs around him, clasping him closer. If she could do this right, she thought, it would mean so much. On one level, lying in his arms felt so simple and familiar, she momentarily believed it might save her life.
There was a noise upstairs, something like an object falling, or maybe it was just the creak of a pipe between the walls of the older house. She tensed for a moment, freezing, poised to listen, and they both stopped. Pete watched her carefully, never taking his eyes off her. He was drunk, she realized then, very drunk.
“What?” he said thickly. “What is it?”
“A noise. Did you hear that?”
“It’s nothing, just the heat, those old radiators. Iss not the kids, they’re sound asleep.” His voice was groggy, his words slightly slurred.
“Are you sure?” Maura sat up, pushing him off of her and starting toward the steps.
“Yeah,” said Pete, falling back down on the rug and letting out his breath in a frustrated whoosh. He rubbed both of his palms over his eye sockets in a hurried motion, as if
to revive himself.
As she rose, Pete’s arms suddenly shot out and looped around her ankles, pulling her back on the rug with a single-minded purpose, and her annoyance flared as he rolled to kiss her again. His merlot-soaked tongue called to her mind the textured underside of a portobello mushroom, fleshy and moist, and then her thoughts flicked briefly to Art. And as she fought the urge to push Pete’s chest away, Maura once more willed herself to concentrate.
When they began again, their hips moving in unison, he entered her, somewhat rougher than she would have liked, and any trace of a spell that she had tried to conjure up had been broken. Her rhythm was off, her attention completely diverted. She could feel Pete’s urgency but still felt no desire. Maura bit down on her bottom lip and closed her eyes. The floor cut awkwardly into her back, and she made an involuntary movement that somehow nudged Pete away, and he grasped her harder. As he moved inside of her, Pete seemed unaware of anything but his immediate pleasure, and because she could hold it in no longer, Maura began to cry, softly at first and then her shoulders shaking, her body rag doll limp. Pete suddenly slammed his hand down on the rug beside her head and rolled off of her body.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I am too, Maura,” he said between gritted teeth. “I wanted this. This one nice moment by the tree tonight. I wanted it to be like it used to be.”
“So did I,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. They lay there for a while, enervated, Pete’s eyes closed, listening to the snaps and pops of the fire, the sudden collapse of a burned log with a shower of embers. She observed the neat row of the stockings on the mantel, the pinpricks of lights on the Christmas tree, throwing off the illusion of order and harmony.
“So where are we going with all of this?” Pete said suddenly, surprising her with how sober he sounded. She had thought him asleep and she paused to collect her thoughts.
“Pete. It hasn’t even been a year. It’s our first Christmas without him. The very first.”
“But then will there be a second and a third? When does the black hole of James’s death begin to fill in for us?” His voice was rising with anger, but there was an anguished edge that was almost pleading.
Maura was silent, and she fought the urge to get up and walk away, just crawl under the covers, but that would be too easy. “I don’t know, Pete,” she answered carefully. “Maybe we still need more time. It all feels brand-new some days, you know?” And she began to cry again softly, and Pete made no move to comfort her.
“You don’t want to really talk, you don’t want to try to move on, you don’t want me in your bed. There’s been something off for a while. You think I didn’t see that? Even before we lost James, I was losing you.” Pete rolled over and the back of his arm hit a wrapped present, which he fiercely shoved out of the way as it skittered on the rug.
“I don’t know, Pete. I do want you. I want James back. I want that day back. I want to do it all over and change it, to make it right. And I want us to work too. I do. I want … I want … to not—” Maura stopped herself. Under the tree, in a moment of honesty, she had been about to confess, about to be swept up by some overwhelming need to confide in Pete all that had happened that day as their son had rolled off the curb. Something coldly rational swam up inside her and stifled the urge. This would do no good now. It wouldn’t bring James back, wouldn’t heal the breaks in their marriage.
“I wish,” Maura had started and then continued boldly, “I wish you would drink less.”
Pete rose, wordlessly, pulled his pants back on, belt unbuckled and flapping as he grabbed his shirt from the floor and padded upstairs without looking back. She could hear him fumbling, running water in their bathroom, and then he thudded down the hall. Maura understood then that he had gone into James’s room to sleep. The thought occurred to her that she would have to make up a story the next morning, tell Ryan something about Pete when he flung open the door to their room on Christmas day and found only one parent.
Maura waited almost thirty minutes, until she knew Pete would be asleep. She unloaded the dishwasher, set out the bowls for cereal in the morning, and grabbed their wineglasses to rinse in the sink. She paused for a moment, absentmindedly gazing out the kitchen window, past the flagstone patio and into the indigo black of the yard beyond. She had always loved this time of night, when everyone was asleep upstairs and the still of the house was hers to inhabit. Before James’s death, gliding through the rooms to plump pillows and straighten up had given her an immense satisfaction, a sense of restored order, that all was right with the world. Awake in a house of sleeping family, the view from her kitchen sink up into the vast night sky had made her feel, at times, like the captain of a ship, responsible for the cargo and the safe passage of all aboard. She felt none of that contentment now. Sighing, Maura grabbed the empty wine bottle and some of Pete’s beer cans to take out to the garage recycling bins.
Pausing on the back porch, she looked up into the vast winter sky, clustered with tinseled stars. Maura inhaled the metallic scent of arctic air into her lungs. She leaned her head back farther to locate the outline of the Big Dipper, the brighter stars forming other constellations whose names she had once known. The North Star eclipsed all the others in brilliance, and she recalled how much James had loved anything to do with astronomy.
She could not remember the tribe; perhaps it was Eskimo, or maybe the Norsemen, who believed that when someone died, their spirit flew into the sky to become a star. Maybe that was where her son was, she thought with a weak smile, a steady ball of light fixed above in the prehistoric blackness, to forever keep watch. James had loved that idea when they had read the story. He had been fascinated with the constellations for months after that, pulling her outside with his little telescope and a map of the night sky for identification.
Maura headed nimbly down the porch steps in her slippers, mindful of the patch of ice Pete kept promising to chip away, and she moved toward the side door of the garage in the frosty night, holding the neck of the empty wine bottle in one hand and cradling the beer cans. Peering down the driveway she could see her neighbors’ decorations, the strands of lights on bushes, the blow-up Frostys, steroidal candy canes, and the reindeers arranged on the snowy grass, motorized necks moving mechanically in the still, windless night. The Presslers had a crèche scene on their front lawn, the Dyalls had a giant grinning plastic Santa, lit from within. It hadn’t snowed in two weeks and the crusty top of the old snow reflected the lights like a glaze.
Maura pulled the down parka tightly around her and tried hard to reach for anything resembling the holiday spirit. But the magic moment by the tree with the kids before bed had evaporated. The failed night of intimacy was clearly a turning point for both of them, and standing now under the night sky on Christmas eve, looking up at the glittering stars, Maura felt a sudden stab of clarity, a conviction about what she needed to do. She dumped the bottle and cans in the recycling bin and headed back indoors, watching her breath huff out in little cartoon gusts.
Very early that Christmas morning, alone in their bed, Maura dreamed of James, one of those rare and haunting, intensely memorable experiences that obscures precisely where the dreamer ends and the dreamscape begins. She had been waiting for something like this to occur, wishing for her son to send her a message by dimming lights or knocking objects off shelves. She’d been hoping he would visit her in her sleep. Up to this point she assumed that the sleeping pills had mostly interfered. Yet even as she was dreaming, Maura knew that when she woke, she would remember elements of the experience for the rest of her life.
In the way that dreams take place in locations both specific and surreally distorted, she and her family were sitting in rows in a church that resembled St. Thomas the Apostle. A small white-and-gold-painted coffin sat in front of them on the altar, and Maura understood, with the internal clarity that dreams provide, that her son was not inside. Instead, she began to realize that the essence of him, his spirit, was somehow moving among
and between her and Pete, Sarah and Ryan, his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Softer than a whisper, he brushed against each of their hearts and wove between their hands and interlocked arms on the velvet cushioned pew, absorbing their breath and reassuring them imperceptibly with an unuttered comfort.
Although in her dream James couldn’t speak, she knew that from the moment he had left himself in the hospital, floating briefly above his broken body, his job had been to stay close to them, a sentry watching over the ones he loved at the house, until the time was right. Maura understood that this new version of her son, ethereal and physically insubstantial, no longer fathomed what it was to be tired or heavy or bound by gravity. She could intuit, as a mother does, his growing anticipation for what would come next, a buoying sense that another warm place was waiting that would feel as good and secure to him as living with his family had felt.
In her dream, James was now entering their bedroom, although Pete was there next to her, instead of lying in James’s room as he was in real time. Swirling around his father’s sleeping form, James dove down, burrowing himself in his chest. She watched Pete’s even breathing rise and fall, and then he stilled for a moment and rolled serenely onto his back. James moved now to Sarah’s room and dipped down into her crib, tenderly caressing his sister’s face, her curls blowing back from her sleep-damp forehead as her hand rose involuntarily, and relaxed its fist. James appeared to be zooming faster now, with a greater sense of urgency, moving into Ryan’s room, and Maura was inexplicably keeping pace, she was with him, observing it all from the inside out. She watched as he circled the room’s perimeter once, past Ryan’s books and games, the discarded clothes on the floor, and moved to the bed to embrace him before retreating.
Now James was increasing his speed, swirling like a mini-cyclone toward Ryan’s front bedroom window, and all at once they were through the glass, outside by the big maple tree and up in its leafless branches. In the night air Maura had the sensation of riding bareback, fused to a winged horse, and yet there was nothing beneath her. James whorled once around the exterior of the house, the white painted boards on the outside of the garage so close that she reached out to touch them.
